Airwalk group designs LTE small cell platform
Femtocell maker works with Mindspeed and Lime Microsystems on new-style base station
Published: 14 February, 2011
READ MORE: AirWalk Communications | Femtocell | LTE
As we have mentioned before, new base station formats for very small cells are evolving rapidly and Mobile World Congress will see a host of developments in flexible, low power, low cost platforms. One interesting one came to our attention en route to Barcelona - a collaboration between CDMA femtocell maker AirWalk, small cell baseband supplier Mindspeed, and Lime Microsystems, a specialist in multiband transceivers.
The three companies have co-developed a small LTE cell of just the kind we expect to see powering many new generation build-outs. It uses the AirWalk architecture, which has already been deployed in indoor and enterprise femtocells as well as outdoor picocells. This is now running on the Mindspeed Transcede SoC, one of the products that made a splash at last year's MWC. And the platform also uses a wideband transceiver from Lime, which supports CDMA, W-CDMA and LTE, playing to the trend for operators to invest in flexible networks that can span 3G and 4G.
The platform will be extended into a full portfolio of products over the next few years. The first iteration runs in the 700MHz band, where Verizon and AT&T are deploying LTE, has 500mW power output, accommodates up to 200 simultaneous users, and supports S1 packet core network interface.
"The market demand for LTE is growing exponentially due to the popularity of mobile video and data applications, making LTE small cell solutions essential to provide data offload and coverage improvements as operators migrate from 3G towards LTE," said Chris Osborn, CTO at AirWalk, in a statement.
Airwalk has worked closely with Lime and also announced a licensing deal with Qualcomm for CDMA femtocells last year.
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